Saturday, December 25, 2010

Mesozoic Miscellany #12

It's Christmas. Big deal! No reason we can't celebrate the best of the dinosaur blogosphere for the last week, and besides: I'm sure Kris Kringle and his elves would like something to read as they relax after a night of frenzied labor.

Everything Dinosaur, Chinleana and Palaeoblog all wrote about the gorgeously preserved Luoping biota of China, dating from the Middle Triassic and revealing a marine ecosystem fully recovered after the cataclysmic extinctions at the end of the Permian. Wonderful, frame-worthy fossils.

Clean your dinosaurs! Saurian posted an even-handed rant about the dusty dinosaur skeletons in some museums.

At Archosaur Musings, Dave Hone interviewed artist Mick Ellison, who has been associated with the American Museum of Natural History for two decades, and done especially beautiful work on small Chinese theropods. Hone also shared some photos of beautiful Pterodactylus specimens at the Solnhofen Museum. Two posts: first and second.

Speaking of which... pterosaur or pterodactyl? Everything Dinosaur provided a quick distinction between the terms.

At his always illuminating blog Gurney Journey, Dinotopia creator James Gurney provided a look at the creation of a painting using action figures and his own homemade Deinocheirus figurine.